Staff Member

Yesterday my team and I unveiled the new Customization options we've been working on for Paper Lantern. Our latest work has been pushed to our demo server - http://go.cpanel.net/paperlantern - for you to have a look at. Here's a brief rundown of what's now possible:

Use the Change Styles interface, located in the User Preference menu, to apply your own custom styles. We've created a few examples as well.

Deploy a style to more than one user by placing it in one of 3 locations, based on which users you want to offer the style to. UPCP leaves it alone in all of those locations.

Style documentation that includes common style overrides and how-to's on how to implement a custom style. These are now pending publication.

Deprecated the use of cpanel_magic_revision in favor of a new ?int style cachebusting system. If you've ever fought with cpanel_magic_revision, this should be a big relief.

Standardized even more files on the .html.tt file extension. We're now a proper TemplateToolkit implementation.

Plugin developers using our LivePHP API can now invoke Paper Lantern user interface chrome so that their apps appear natively inside Paper Lantern. This includes any Customizations. SDK documentation is coming.

We've created a few styles you can switch to in the Change Styles interface covering quite a few of the most common aesthetic concerns people have had about Paper Lantern's default appearance. For example, the "No Floating Header" style demonstrates how to disable the floating header bar which a few people have had concerns about. The "Stacked Icons" style demonstrates how to place the icon descriptions to the right of the icons in the main content area. (If you ever filed any feedback with us about the lack of centered text under the icons, that one's for you)

...and then the "fun" style, Tidy, simply takes a stab at the aesthetics by establishing a "light and modern" look-and-feel.

All of these styles are implemented using simple CSS and style assets (images and fonts) which are a part of the common web design toolkit. A style developer simply SFTPs (or webDav's) into the correct place and develops a style as he would any other web design task. To deploy the style to more than one user on the system, simply move the style to the correct location. (and, if you're wondering, yes you can turn all of this on or off by toggling an ACL checkbox in the Feature Manager)

The full capability of CSS3 is now available. Your style developer won't throttle you for making them use ancient techniques. They might even purr a little when they crack open the code and see Twitter Bootstrap DOM structures to work with. Heck, you might even be able to re-use the same stylesheet-and-assets from your company website as a style for cPanel.

Don't like our icons? You can now replace it with one you provide...or turn it off entirely with 1 CSS rule.

Style directories can now be stored in version control. Simply check-out/clone your VCS repo into the correct place and away you go.

Theme and Style management APIs now enable the remote management of an account's Theme and Style settings. If you need to automate the move to Paper Lantern, it's totally scriptable.

Plugin maintainers can now deeply integrate their project into Paper Lantern, using all of the same theme and styles as Paper Lantern does.

Even more is on the way, so please do stay tuned. Here's roughly what the horizon looks like:

We know that it's very common for our customers to inject content into the interface so we're creating the means to do this simply and easily. Expect support for simple content (html, css, js), flash embeds, javascript single-page-applications, access to our API and more.

A customization control panel interface in WHM for changing common customization settings. Company name, logo, colors, support information, etc.

Lots of bug fixes are on the way for the mobile responsiveness of Paper Lantern.

...after that list, we get into the fun stuff like new features and workflows.

A quick question. I haven't started doing any customizations to Paper Lantern, and yet on a VPS the top logo:

/http://[hostname]/cPanel_magic_revision_1396572781/frontend/paper_lantern/branding/top-logo_vps2.png
is mostly black with a transparent background (except for the orange cPanel name), on a black header background. Part of that PNG extends past the bottom line of the header, which would be fine if it were on a different colored background. As it is, it looks like a mistake.

Is there any way to customize the links that appear at the top of Paper Lantern? Some of our users don't understand why there is a menu there with a few items which seem to have been arbitrarily chosen. For example, many of our users never touch add-on domains.

Thanks,

Mark

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Also, is there a way to fix the cPanel VPS Optimized logo in Paper Lantern? It hangs down into the top menu (which includes add-on domains and such). It looks a bit unprofessional.

Mark, there's another thread about Paper Lantern, which details how to go about customizations. I don't have it off-hand, but I'm sure it can be found in the search. Also, I may be wrong, but I believe Paper Lantern is more-or-less still in BETA.

Hi, thanks for the reply. However, I believe that thread basically says that you can't really change anything yet. :-( I think you are right about it being beta, though the release notes for each new cPanel version make it sound ready for production.

And, in a blog post, cPanel says:

"Paper Lantern has a new goal: It must be 100% usable in every release of cPanel & WHM. Since its introduction in cPanel & WHM version 11.42, Paper Lantern has met these goals and more."

Staff Member

A fix for the VPS optimized logo is in 11.44.1, which is in EDGE and CURRENT right now. It'll head to RELEASE soon.

As I said before, we're aiming to have customization support in Paper Lantern for the 11.46 release. This includes the style stuff I mentioned in OP as well as the custom content work and a few other things in support of customization.

Staff Member

Actually our release team pushed 11.44.1 to RELEASE last night (at 10pm Houston Time). Depending on when your system checks for updates, the fix may have been applied last night. Have a look and let me know.

Staff Member

We go into feature freeze for 11.46 in the middle of August. After that, it's a matter of polishing up a release candidate and our QA team having a thorough look over everything. If they don't find anything, then we'll set an official date for release. Sorry that's really all I can say as far as schedule goes. We think that it's more important for us to release stable software than to stick to a schedule.

If you'd like, you can switch your WHM » Update Preferences setting to EDGE. We'll be releasing over the EDGE tier at some point in time after the feature freeze but before official release so that people can help us vet it. (We won't be ready to call it production-ready until after our QA procedures complete though, so please don't use an EDGE build in production.)